Mia Couto: ‘Each of us is the entire humanity’

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Here, at the FIL, thousands and thousands of people march through the fair’s aisles, eyes wide open, amazed, carefully flipping through books.

These are complicated times. As a Mexican saying goes, the world is “patas pa’rriba” (upside down), so a word, a space, or an event can act as antidotes to moments filled with despair.

The Guadalajara International Book Fair has just opened, and perhaps many may wonder, “So what does this have to do with me?” Well, I’m going to answer that here.

When we are on the brink of a Third World War, when the figure of Trump (without Donald) rises as a new horseman of the Apocalypse, when millions of people (called migrants) move from one place to another, risking their lives and enduring the most shameful humiliations a human being can experience, when a genocide occurs on the other side of the world, when hundreds of thousands wander the streets hungry and homeless in “the most powerful country in the world,” and when so many unimaginable things happen, we find ourselves in this capsule that can be defined as hope.

Here, at the FIL, thousands and thousands of people march through the fair’s aisles, eyes wide open, amazed, carefully flipping through books. Armies of children joke with the ‘storyteller,’ teenagers beg or simply sit on the floor, reading.

Here, Artificial Intelligence doesn’t exist. People prefer making discoveries rather than having a machine tell them. Here, there is no obsession with ‘WhatsApp,’ ‘TikTokers,’ or life in selfies. “Put the phones on FIL mode,” they said at the opening. And that FIL mode was walking through those endless aisles, sitting to listen to Mia Couto, the writer who won the 2024 FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages, appealing to poetry, language, and nature as a church inhabited by society.

Here, Artificial Intelligence doesn’t exist. People prefer making discoveries rather than having a machine tell them. Here, there is no obsession with ‘WhatsApp,’ ‘TikTokers,’ or life in selfies.

“I’m looking for someone who will listen to me and exchange their soul with me,” said Mia Couto in his message.

Or the message from Nobel Prize-winning writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, of Tanzanian origin, who pointed out the effects of colonization that now, powerful countries refuse to acknowledge in the phenomenon of migration.

“What’s happening now is dramatically different from the past, as the movement is from territories once colonized by Europe, where people leave their countries seeking prosperity, but nothing criminal about it; this is not a desire driven by criminality or malice,” he said.

Or Irene Vallejo, the author of the phenomenon El Infinito en un Junco, where the birth of the book becomes the birth and origin of our history: the word.

The children run; we’d like to imagine they’re fleeing from social networks, watching cartoons with their parents, imagining stories, not searching for them in technology. There is hope, and the FIL, this world that nourishes us for a few days, is a testament to that hope.

Mia Couto recalls when his father took him to see a river, that marvelous part of nature. “I remember my father placing his hand on my shoulder and asking, ‘Do you like it?’ I wanted to answer, but I didn’t have words. I lacked a language. Then, he murmured, ‘My son, this is your church.'”

Marisol Schulz: “The important thing is not to fear reading, from wherever it may be. So many worlds, so many realities are discovered”